President Bush, one hears, has grown dismayed that no matter how hard a line he takes in the Middle East, no matter how much he supports Israel, he still gains only a sliver — something on the order of 20% — of support within the Jewish community when it gets right down to voting. We would urge the president not to get discouraged on this front. There are hundreds of thousands within the Jewish community who recognize — as Vice President Cheney stressed to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee yesterday — that Mr. Bush has been an extraordinarily good friend to the Jewish community and to Israel. And, we would add, there are a lot of turns this war can take.

At the moment, the left and the Arabists are rapidly gaining hope in the maneuvering of the Saudis. The benign view of what is happening is that the Saudi monarchy is frightened at the expansion of Iranian power throughout the region. The differences between them — Arab vs. Persian, Sunni vs. Shiite — are significant. Iran is seen as having a friendly regime in Iraq, which, under Saddam, had served as a bulwark against Iranian/Shiite aspirations; a friendly regime in Syria that is composed of Alawites, a split off from the Shiites, and an ally in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is Iran’s cat’s paw and Shiites make up about 40% of the population.

There is a Shiite majority in Bahrain, and significant Shiite minorities in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. So, this benign view goes, it behooves the Saudis to broker a deal to resolve the Palestinian matter on terms which can be sold to their own publics as the best deal available given the global balance of power. The theory goes that to work for them, such a deal would have to contain sufficient elements to have some appeal for the Muslim Arabs. That is the theory in which the Saudis, after the fighting over the summer in which they secretly were rooting for the Israelis to crush Hezbollah, relaunched their notorious initiative of several years ago.

Prime Minister Olmert publicly praised the Saudi king, after a rumored, but not confirmed, meeting with the former Saudi envoy to Washington, Prince Bandar, in Amman. Then the Saudis prevailed upon Fatah and Hamas to form a unity government. That is known as the Mecca deal. The Saudis are also said to be reaching out to the Jewish community here in America and are hosting an Arab League summit soon to consider changes in the text of the Arab League’s scheme. The League endorsed the Saudi plan at its meeting in Beirut in 2002. Our guess is that were Prime Minister Sharon not in a coma but in power in Israel today, markers would have been laid down in respect of the Saudi plan that Israel would not go anywhere near the division of Jerusalem that the Saudis seek.

Foreign Minister Livni, however, has said several times in recent days that the problem with the Saudi plan concerns its language on repatriating Palestinian Arab refugees. She did not say the problem is the Saudis’ scheme to return to Israel’s 1967 borders; the Saudis are trying to amend the plan by dropping the reference to U.N. Resolution 194, a 1948 dead letter that deals in part with Jerusalem and the Palestinian Arab refugees. But Amr Moussa, the Egyptian running the Arab League, objects; and thus far Hamas isn’t buying the change, which is why the Saudis are withholding the $1 billion they promised the Palestinian Arabs at Mecca.

The best thing Mr. Bush can do is stand apart from these kinds of negotiations. There is a constituency, we have no doubt, in favor of American involvement in these peace schemes. But we’re not part of it. We are not against peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. Or between Israel and its neighboring or nearby countries. But we don’t trust the Saudi king as far as we can throw the whole Middle East. Nor are we under any illusion that the global war that is being levied against America and other Western countries by our Islamist foes has to do with Israel in the first place. Mr. Bush doesn’t need to make peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs in order to go down in history as a friend of Israel. His greatest legacy will be winning the war against America.